LoFi/8-bit Sound and Music

I'm working on a somewhat old school pixelicious (320x240 resolution intentionally pumped up to 640x480 with no interpolation) game, and I realized I completely ignored one key aspect of it: sound. Delicious LoFi square wave goodness. Or something.

Unfortunately, I have no idea where to begin. I'm not even sure if I should make samples (I also have no idea how to do that, but that's for a whole 'nother forum) or procedurally generate them within the code. Additionally, I assume music would be generated with samples, something MIDI style...a .mod player or something?

Sorry about the vagueness, but as you can see, I have no idea what I'm doing. All my expertise is related to visual aspects, but the game is disconcertingly silent.

Any thoughts on where to begin, programs to use, tutorials to look at? I've found little info specific to the low quality artificial sounds I'm looking for. What am I looking for? Think Megaman, or Cave Story.

If you don't want to handle it yourself, you could always get a composer who is well versed in classical synthesis to write you some tracks. You can obviously manage it yourself without too much of a hassle, since the music is generally uncomplicated, but I'm mentioning the possibility of getting the extra help just in case you don't feel like learning and adding all the extra audio end of it to your workflow.

In terms of how to handle it, you could either use extremely lo-fi synths to create the music, or you could use slightly more modern synths (to acknowledge that it's a more recent game) and then compess them at a low bitrate to achieve a similar lo-fi effect with a slightly "full"-er sound.

Anyway, just my two cents. I'll be curious to see how you end up handling it! Good luck!

Certainly, monteboyd! I've completed the engine more or less (sans any audio implementation, obviously), though I'm sure I'll continue to add things as needed (no enemy AI yet, no cutscenes, all those little garnishes still need to be done), and I've started directing my efforts toward content generation. Once things get along further, I'll post some screens in the Work in Progress forum.

It's written in C++ using OpenGL and SDL, and is an open-ended platformer, Ã¡ la Metroid. You play Damascus Steel, the world's premier monster hunter, and go around ruining monsters' crap with a shotgun as your primary weapon.

I'm also basically ripping off Metroid in the sense that there is a lot of back tracking to explore new areas as you gain new abilities. There is going to be a bit of a survivalist horror thrown in too, as I plan on making ammo a precious commodity (with a crappy infinite melee backup, of course!).

I would like to have some sort of dialog driven plot as well, but I want to finish getting the game mechanics dialed down and make more content first.

Anyway, thanks for the tips everyone, I've never actually made sound effects before, so we'll see how it goes!

There are tons of free emulations of old synths and computer audio chips (but I think most of them were targeted at the PC, not the Mac). If you have access to a PC, there are some great modern interpretations of trackers. My favorite is Buzz.